The Twilight TwentyFive
by vanilladoubleshot
Summary: A part of The Twilight 25 challenge at thetwilight25 dot livejournal dot com. ROUND ONE. Ratings and themes vary inside; mature readers preferred.
1. Sour

**The Twilight Twenty-Five**

**Prompt:** _Sour_  
**Pen name:** vanilladoubleshot  
**Pairing: **Edward

**Rating: **T

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Yes, I'm taking part in The Twilight 25! To those of you who may read _Ars Moriendi_, it's coming very soon. After the last chapter, getting things flowing is just taking a little while.

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Edward relished in the grime of the Lower East Side tenements, forgotten in the passage of time like him, stuck in an age of disease and fever: great behemoth castles of death and sadness and dark sooty smoke that turned white moths black and aged children to frail adults too soon.

He learned Italian from the begging singsong children's thoughts at the shuckery, withstanding the near-constant burn of his throat as the crescent-shaped knives sliced off tiny fingers, the floral scent of their blood an ever-present counternote to the sickening rot-brine of oysters.

Near the shirtwaist factory Edward became familiar with prayer in Yiddish and Hebrew: long melancholy sounds that praised an invisible God from whom Edward felt so far as he paced the cobbled blocks, cotton threads and heat alternately dulling and heightening the young women's blood as they lived in tedium, repetitive psalms flowing rhythmic with repetitive motion… bobbin thread pluck, bobbin thread pluck…

His interest piqued often near the factory as girls' hair caught in the mechanisms and their slender golden necks broke and their blood spilled over cloth like dye as they lost their scalps and long fine dark hair wound spools.

But Edward could never taste innocent blood.

Instead he waited, each night vigilant and hungry, near the brightest lit lamp at the corner of Houston Street, just another lean boy looking raw and mean lurking near the doors, sizing up every other man passing through the doors for competition and shame.

No one met his red eyes.

He waited, still and bound tight ready to pounce, through the chemical smells of Prince Matchabelli Infanta, "the most disturbing perfume of the year" and house-made sludgy schnapps and red wine that sat like lead weights in the liver. His brain reeled at the images and thoughts that assaulted him night after night: miserable childhoods and horrific trips across the sea, rushes on the bank and rashes on thighs.

And inevitably, it would come.

_No!_

_Stop!_

_Aiutilo!_

_Hjälp mig!_

But on the last night, the cry was silenced before the thoughts of the _fetita _could leave her slashed throat, and Edward's vision swam with sweet dripping crimson hyacinth and walnut as he flew to the alley cloaked in gristly grime to find her suitor too late –

Edward looked for a moment that seared her into his brain forever, pale white skin and doe-brown eyes locked open, crumped and bleeding on the wet alley floor with rats in her long brown hair, before he took off in pursuit of the stench he sought, the cloying odor of a soul that had died and gone bad –

Dark poison citrus; lemon and overripe orange.


	2. Raindrops

**Prompt:** _Raindrops_

**Pen name:** vanilladoubleshot  
**Pairing: **Alice  
**Rating: **PG-13

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This is a drabble. That means it is exactly 100 words. Please don't comment that it's "too short."

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The multihued colors bend and shine within the prism of the raindrop, lacing crimson to cantaloupe and into golds and greens that Alice had never seen before, tearful indigo in the underbelly of the thin shimmering skin of the water that she could see, separate from the wet indulgence of the drop as it landed and shattered on her skin, slicing off shimmering shards that arced like snowflakes into the gray afternoon.

Laying alone in the riverbed, Alice knew that this vison was not clairvoyance but overabundance.

Alice's white face peered into the muddy water.

Shorn hair. _Deep red eyes_.


	3. Juvenile

**Prompt:** _Juvenile_  
**Pen name:** vanilladoubleshot  
**Pairing: **Carlisle/implied!Esme, Carlisle/Edward (Friendship)

**Rating: **PG-13

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Just a blarg. I am uneasy writing Carlisle; did I succeed?

* * *

_Dr. Cullen_, he asked me; so formal still despite a year's passing since we were strangers, despite constant reinforcement in my actions, words, even my thoughts, that he was my beloved son: _Who is the girl who see whenever we pass by a yew tree? You so rarely think of any human's face for more than a moment, but hers is a countenance you conjure like clockwork whenever you see lanced leaves._

Were he to be human, the breadth of perception and depth of regret he carried with him in every knowing flick of his eyes might well reduce even me to tears. He never voiced his own thoughts with me, but asked markedly of mine, choosing to spear my immobile heart with names and faces designed most efficaciously to wound me.

_She wears almost modern attire, _he pressed, tousling his blood-matted hair, still attempting to master the hunt but able to control his movements, sated by four wolves. He glut himself still in vain effort to quell the burn in his throat, knowing now, after a full year, that relief could never be true.

His red-rimmed eyes narrowed as he followed my careless thought, and his next words cut me to the bone.

_She's surely still alive._

I tried to explain the seismic shift, the meteoric hold over me had by that the little girl in Ohio, and how when I saw her shy smile as I splinted her broken leg, and how mischievous her eyes became when she told me that she'd fallen from the large yew tree on the edge of her family's property, and that she had climbed to the very top of the tree trying to see Columbus because she heard that it shone with lights like a fallen constellation.

_I love her_, I said simply, hoping that he in all of his intellectual observance and righteous anger, forgetful of his mere eighteen years of wisdom, would understand. _I belong to her, forever._

_Then why don't you? _he asked. His hands were bloody. His gaze was calculating, yet not cruel, and I let hope fill me for a moment that one day he might learn to call me Carlisle.

_She is only a child, _I explained. _To change a child is to perform a monstrous deed._

Edward's eyes darkened to black and I resisted my immediate urge to fall into a run away from the volatile youth before me:

Esme Platt was nearly seventeen when she fell from her yew tree.

_You're wrong_, Edward said coolly, wiping the wolves' blood across his starched white shirt. _To change a child is merely to create a monster._


End file.
